Koyanagawa Morimune (小梁川盛宗, 1440 - November 19, 1500) was a

samurai were the hereditary military nobility and officer caste of medieval and early-modern Japan from the late 12th century until their abolition in 1876. They were the well-paid retainers of the '' daimyo'' (the great feudal landholders). They h ...

during the

Muromachi period The is a division of Japanese history running from approximately 1336 to 1573. The period marks the governance of the Muromachi or Ashikaga shogunate (''Muromachi bakufu'' or ''Ashikaga bakufu''), which was officially established in 1338 by t ...

. He is the founder of the Koyanagawa clan, a branch of the

Date clan The is a Japanese samurai kin group. Papinot, Jacques Edmond Joseph. (1906). ''Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie du Japon''; Papinot, (2003)"Date", ''Nobiliare du Japon'', p. 5 retrieved 2013-5-5. History The Date family was founded ...

Life

Date Morimune was born in 1440 as the third son of Date Mochimune, a

daimyo were powerful Japanese magnates, feudal lords who, from the 10th century to the early Meiji period in the middle 19th century, ruled most of Japan from their vast, hereditary land holdings. They were subordinate to the shogun and nominally ...

(

feudal Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, cultural and political customs that flourished in Middle Ages, medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a wa ...

lord) and the 11th head of the Date clan. According to ''Date Seishin Kafu'', Morimune gathered the Date clan

vassals A vassal or liege subject is a person regarded as having a mutual obligation to a lord or monarch, in the context of the feudal system in medieval Europe. While the subordinate party is called a vassal, the dominant party is called a suzerain. W ...

and led all the officials during the time when the 13th clan head, Morimune's nephew, Date Naomune, was aged from 3 to 15 (1455-1467). However, this is considered impossible because not only the elder brother and 12th clan head, Date Narimune, but also Date Mochimune (died in 1469) were still alive at this time. Later, he founded the Koyanagawa clan, taking its name from Koyanagawa, Date-gun,

Mutsu Province was an old province of Japan in the area of Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate and Aomori Prefectures and the municipalities of Kazuno and Kosaka in Akita Prefecture. Mutsu Province is also known as or . The term is often used to refer to the comb ...

Genealogy

As the son of Date Mochimune, Morimune descends from Fujiwara no Yamakage's line of the

Fujiwara clan was a powerful family of imperial regents in Japan, descending from the Nakatomi clan and, as legend held, through them their ancestral god Ame-no-Koyane. The Fujiwara prospered since the ancient times and dominated the imperial court until th ...

's Hokke house through the Date clan. Morimune's descendants, the Koyanagawa clan, ruled Notezaki,

since the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

until the

Meiji Restoration The , referred to at the time as the , and also known as the Meiji Renovation, Revolution, Regeneration, Reform, or Renewal, was a political event that restored practical imperial rule to Japan in 1868 under Emperor Meiji. Although there were ...

in 1867.

References

15th-century Japanese people People of Muromachi-period Japan Samurai {{Samurai-stub